Inferno (operating system)

From ArticleWorld

Inferno is a Unix-descendant operating system for distributed services. It can run either hosted by another operating system, like Linux or Windows, or run natively on a broad range of hardware, on several architectures. In order to achieve this, Inferno provides a consistent, standard interface to the applications, and a communication protocol named Styx, similar to Plan 9's 9P2000.

Limbo

Limbo is the standard programming language which Vita Nuova, Inferno's producer, recommends to all developers. It is a bytecode-compiled language, executing using a just-in-time-compiling virtual machine. It is a quite appreciated and very portable type-safe programming language.

Hosts

Inferno can either run on native hardware, but also as a virtual operating system, on top of another system. All Inferno applications run natively, regardless of the host.

Inferno runs natively on x86 CPUs, as well as MIPS, XScale, ARM, StrongARM, Thumb and PowerPC. It also functions as a virtual OS on top of Plan 9, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, several other Unices, Microsoft Windows and even as an Internet Explorer plugin.

Inferno is distributed under a free software license. The license itself is a mixture of GPL, LGPL and MIT, as components are also licensed under various licenses. The producer also offers a commercial license for those who do not wish to make their changes available under free software.